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The Visitor (episode)
After Sisko's apparent death, Jake is unable to deal with the loss. Summary The Visitor begins in an unusual fashion: on Earth in a house on the Louisiana Bayou near New Orleans. Its dark and stormy outside as an elderly Jake Sisko sits down in front of a fire. Soon there comes a knock at the door and Jake opens the door, revealing a young woman looking for refuge from the downpour. After a few minutes of idle chit chat the visitor reveals that she in fact is a writer and is looking for the writer Jake Sisko. Confirming that Jake is who she is talking to, she cuts to the chase and asks, very promptly, why he stopped writing. Taking a moment Jake responds that he stopped writing, not because of any reason or recourse, but because of an event that happened to him when he was 18 years old. His father, Benjamin Sisko had died. Apparently, when Jake was younger in the year 2372 (sometime between Stardate 49011.4 and 49066.5) he lived on Deep Space Nine where his father was the Captain. In a rare event that happens only every 50 years, the Bajoran wormhole was going to undergo an ‘inversion’. During this inversion rare anomalies and temporal fluctuations were going to occur, creating an event that would not want to be missed. Jake was working on a particularly hard piece of prose at this time and was trying to wrap his head around when his father asked him to come along on the ''Defiant'' to watch. While the wormhole began inverting, both Jake and Ben were in Engineering calibrating and monitoring various systems. The warp core began to go critical from an energy flux. Ben Sisko was able to stop the core from rupturing but an energy discharge almost struck Jake. It instead hit Ben when he pushed Jake out of the way. Following this the Bajorans mourned the loss of the Emissary and consoled Jake for almost a year until Benjamin reappeared for a few moments while Jake was asleep in bed. After his father disappeared again Jake tried to explain it to Dax who agreed to scan for any anomalies and picked up a slight variance but disregarded it and told Jake it was only a dream. A few months later, Jake found his father in a hallway on DS9 and was physically able to touch him. Taking him immediately to sick bay, they discovered that Ben is caught in a temporal inversion, falling in and out of sync with our own time. Trying to save him as he shifts, Jake loses his father again but has hope that he is out there somewhere. Years pass on and through grief and hope Jake accepted this and moved on in his life, becoming a writer, married a Bajoran woman and moved back to Earth. Benjamin appeared and they catch up before he leaves yet again. Distraught, Jake vowed to get his father back and spent the next 20 years working out exactly how to do it. By this time 50 years have passed and Jake hoped that because the wormhole would be inverting again he could grab his father and put him back into synch with his own life. Recreating the accident, Jake is pulled into the limbo that Ben has been stuck in for 50 years. In this time Ben finds out that Jake has lost his wife, stopped writing, and has dedicated his life to getting him back. Distressed Ben makes Jake promise to get his life back. Pulled back into our time Jake knows he has probably lost his father. Back in the present, the woman asks why he didn’t go back to writing and Jake reveals that he has. And that there isn’t enough time left for him, that he was dying. Now morning, the woman leaves and promises to enjoy life and Jake smiles resting in an old chair. After a while he falls asleep and is awakened by Ben and they have a bittersweet reunion. Jake explains that there isn’t enough time, that he will be dead soon from poison. He explains that the sync was like a rubber band. He was the anchor for his father. Sometimes the band would be pulled taut and during those times before the tension was released Ben would temporarily rejoin our time but pulled away again once it snapped back. Once Jake died Ben would be lost in limbo forever. The only way to save him was to cut the cord at the time its most taut, when he was in perfect synch with our time. If he did so Benjamin would be shot back to the time of the incident and he could jump out of the way before he got caught in the loop. Benjamin watches his son die in front of him and is slingshot back to the original incident and dives out of the way pushing Jake on the ground as well, saving them both from the fate that would take away both their lives. Background Information According to most staff on the show this was one of Deep Space Nine's best episodes they worked on. It should also be noted that Avery Brooks and Cirroc Lofton cite this as one of their favorite episodes, along with Far Beyond the Stars. Many fans of Deep Space Nine have also counted this among their favorite episodes. Rachel Robinson, who played old Jake's visitor, is Andrew Robinson's (Garak) daughter. Quotes * "I want you to promise me something. I want you to promise me that every once in a while you will peak your head out from behind that book and see what's going on around you. It's life!" -Benjamin Sisko to an adult Jake Links and References Guest Stars * Aron Eisenberg as Nog * Tony Todd as the adult Jake Sisko * Rachel Robinson as Melanie * Galyn Gorg as Korena Sisko References ion surfing; French Quarter; subspace * 47 references Visitor, The de:Der Besuch nl:The Visitor